Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) from Amazon Web Services offers scalable cloud capacity for setting up a virtual server.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/JE/Y9/CNS8WHZU84TV.pngAmazon AWSEC2 - often better to buy direct2018-08-31T19:26:38.110ZGenerally, I've seen EC2 used by the entire company as I've worked mostly in environments where there were only other Software Engineers making up the bulk of the company.
It frequently addressed the issue of having reliable web servers or virtual machines without having to actually acquire physical servers, rely on resellers of the service or deal with other providers who I've had technical issues with in the past.,Variety of sizes, you can fine-tune your instance quite a lot rather than being tied into specific tiers like some resellers offer.
Easy to provision, either using an Amazon tool or AMI, Terraform and/or Ansible I've found it easy to get set up and going on a new EC2 instance.,With the rise of tools such as Ansible it would be good to see AWS provide similar standardised tooling for EC2.,10,When I first was involved in shifting from physical servers to EC2 we saw an initial saving of around 80% a month; previously we had been paying in excess of £1000 per server per month and had 3 servers.,HerokuRyan MacGillivrayAWS - launchpad for VPS' at usage-based billing2018-08-29T19:00:54.598ZWe have been using Amazon's EC2 service to host our Magento eCommerce website on Amazon's AMI. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and between uptime and manageability we are very pleased. We chose this platform for the attractive prospect of usage-based billing and potential for provisioning more resources as we grow as well as auto-scaling and load balancing options. The migration was hand-in-hand with a re-development, platform and host were new, so comparing to our old Wordpress store on shared hosting would not be apples to apples at all. All said, we have been please with AWS EC2 on the whole.,It's a very easy task to fire up an EC2, even for first-timer education. Launch a free account, pop into EC2, and follow the prompts.
Snapshots and Images are particularly nice, fast and easy to work with. I've had my entire catalog erased by mistake, and been able to restore content within minutes.
Access to data is right there - you have root access to your virtual machine, no clunky interfaces, no negotiation with hosts for resources.,EC2 is quick to launch, but ends up being an unnecessarily complex rabbit hole. Most users on EC2 are attempting to accomplish the same goals: host content with close to 0 fault tolerance. I want people to be able to buy my stuff. I should be able to one-click a load balancing and autoscaling package for my existing EC2 instance that will scale resources in proportion to my incoming sessions and corresponding usage. Instead, setting up advanced EC2 features ends up requiring an expert to accomplish functions which should be readily available.
Usage-based billing sounds like you may be getting the best value, but understand that Amazon is not losing money on hosting, and costs are no longer entirely predictable. Cents for data piles up quickly and once you get load balancing up with a influx of customers, your finance department comes at you waving your budget around...,7,AWS has been a costly experiment, only from the surprise costs of hosting.,GoDaddy, DigitalOcean and Bluehost,Handshake, Google Analytics, AvazaBrendon BrownEC2 from AWS makes provisioning and managinig cloud servers cost-effective and quick.2018-08-29T18:25:59.334ZWe are a Managed Services Provider in the Philadelphia area that specializes in moving clients to the cloud. As part of our Cloud Stack, we heavily deploy AWS technologies including EC2. I personally manages multiple AWS accounts that all have EC2 instances in both development and production. EC2 tackles a huge problem when it comes to right-sizing your servers. With EC2, we can spin up a server in the cloud for a client, let them test it, and if it turns out the specs aren't right, within 5 minutes we can have everything changed to a completely different set of specs.,EC2 makes right-sizing your servers a breeze. You can quickly spin up a server in the cloud and if it turns out the vCPU, RAM, or storage space is wrong, within minutes you can change all of that.
EC2 makes backups and restores a breeze. We actually had a client that allowed a hacker to remote into their production server. We were able to shutdown the EC2 instance, spin up a backup from an AMI, and then attach the existing elastic IP. This was all done within a 15 minute window.
EC2 makes quickly deploying multiple servers a very easy. Within minutes, you can deploy a whole fleet of cloud servers.
EC2 is easy to script. We are able to save our clients a lot of money by scripting their EC2 instance to shutdown/startup at predetermined times so they are only paying for the server when they are using it.,EC2 in my opinion, is lacking the ability to connect to a console from within the AWS console. I sometimes miss how I can connect to the console with VMware and Hyper-V but not with EC2. You have to utilize RDP or SSH to connect to an instance.
Sometimes EC2 instances lockup due to reasons with the underlying hardware and need to be shutdown and the started back up so the instance can spin up on new hardware. This is sometimes a problem because unless you set up proper alerting/scripting, you don't know there is an issue until a user reports it.
EC2 can be a bit daunting for the beginning user. You really do need some kind of training before you dive in.,10,AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.,VMware vCenter Server, IT Glue, Kaseya AuthAnvil, Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA), Autotask, QuoteWerks, Microsoft Office 365Michael KerznerEC2 is great when it comes to simplicity and performing2018-09-07T16:25:20.892ZIt is being used by whole organization. We use hundreds of EC2 instances. We are a small company so we do not have resources to maintain physical instances. EC2 solves this issue by omitting the need to maintain our own servers or machines.,Easy to maintain. We can elastically grow the instances as we need.
Can be distributed among several regions, hence it performs well.
Can be configured to restrict the access to instances outside specific IPs.
Can be tied to load balancer.
Spot instances available to bid for cheaper price.,There should be an option to upgrade to only CPU and memory, instead of getting overall big instances.
Sometime we are forced to upgrade or terminate old instances. They could support old instances.
Launch time of the instances has room for improvement. Could be faster.,8,I think, we have a positive impact overall. Easy to maintain.
Scaled and launched more servers at our peak hours
Managed all servers through console and SSH
But it is a bit expensive overall,Microsoft Azure, Heroku, Google Cloud CDN and Rackspace Cloud Hosting,Salesforce App Cloud, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, MySQL, IntelliJ IDEARanjeet ShahAmazon: Big IaaS option for your business2018-09-04T19:31:09.654ZBoth our customers and we have a wide range of applications uploaded in Amazon EC2. Since we do not have physical servers, we have EC2 instances in our testing, development, production and administrative departments. Also, we support many clients who prefer to manage their own EC2 instances.
EC2 instances allow us to abstract all the management of servers and concentrate on what really generates value in our business: building solutions for our clients.,Quick learning curve and ease of acquisition for new learners due to their 12 month free trial.
Connection to the entire AWS ecosystem, such as RDS service for database management.
Dynamic scaling of instance resources allows you to achieve the performance you are looking for without having to pay more than necessary.
Hot swap of volumes and other resources.,You can't easily know the end of free trial period, which can generate monthly costs for unused services (even so, the support for these isolated cases is very good!)
The default configuration of resource usage alerts could be better. Even so, there are alternatives to control these cases outside of AWS.
While you're still learning how to handle instances, one can make some serious mistakes, such as leaving open ports or deleting an instance without realizing it. Again, is not a core AWS responsability but a few alerts could be great (or you can leave infraestructure experts handle all the management).,10,EC2 reduced the need for many specialized personnel for infrastructure.
Reduced expenses in acquisition and maintenance of servers.
Reduced costs in configuration of development and production environments, due to virtualization, images and volume management.
The perception of many clients improves when you work with an ally like Amazon AWS, which translates into contracts.,Google Compute Engine and VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud,Google Compute Engine, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Miguel Angel Merino Vega

Generally, I've seen EC2 used by the entire company as I've worked mostly in environments where there were only other Software Engineers making up the bulk of the company.

It frequently addressed the issue of having reliable web servers or virtual machines without having to actually acquire physical servers, rely on resellers of the service or deal with other providers who I've had technical issues with in the past.

I've found that while EC2 and AWS might mean initially more setup than purchasing compute resources through a reseller it makes life much easier down the line as you have more control over your instances and other resources. This also ends up that it will cost more dev time up front but less money in comparison.

It's also possible to fine-tune your AWS spending whereas I've found this difficult with AWS resellers in the past.

We have been using Amazon's EC2 service to host our Magento eCommerce website on Amazon's AMI. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and between uptime and manageability we are very pleased. We chose this platform for the attractive prospect of usage-based billing and potential for provisioning more resources as we grow as well as auto-scaling and load balancing options. The migration was hand-in-hand with a re-development, platform and host were new, so comparing to our old Wordpress store on shared hosting would not be apples to apples at all. All said, we have been please with AWS EC2 on the whole.

EC2 is quick to launch, but ends up being an unnecessarily complex rabbit hole. Most users on EC2 are attempting to accomplish the same goals: host content with close to 0 fault tolerance. I want people to be able to buy my stuff. I should be able to one-click a load balancing and autoscaling package for my existing EC2 instance that will scale resources in proportion to my incoming sessions and corresponding usage. Instead, setting up advanced EC2 features ends up requiring an expert to accomplish functions which should be readily available.

Usage-based billing sounds like you may be getting the best value, but understand that Amazon is not losing money on hosting, and costs are no longer entirely predictable. Cents for data piles up quickly and once you get load balancing up with a influx of customers, your finance department comes at you waving your budget around...

We are currently exploring alternative hosts - likely a direct partnership - collocated or dedicated. We like the predictability of a monthly fee, a service partner to call in case of crisis, and pushing the resource scaling responsibility back to a partner who is eager to scale down but contractually obligated to scale perfectly.

We are a Managed Services Provider in the Philadelphia area that specializes in moving clients to the cloud. As part of our Cloud Stack, we heavily deploy AWS technologies including EC2. I personally manages multiple AWS accounts that all have EC2 instances in both development and production. EC2 tackles a huge problem when it comes to right-sizing your servers. With EC2, we can spin up a server in the cloud for a client, let them test it, and if it turns out the specs aren't right, within 5 minutes we can have everything changed to a completely different set of specs.

EC2 makes right-sizing your servers a breeze. You can quickly spin up a server in the cloud and if it turns out the vCPU, RAM, or storage space is wrong, within minutes you can change all of that.

EC2 makes backups and restores a breeze. We actually had a client that allowed a hacker to remote into their production server. We were able to shutdown the EC2 instance, spin up a backup from an AMI, and then attach the existing elastic IP. This was all done within a 15 minute window.

EC2 makes quickly deploying multiple servers a very easy. Within minutes, you can deploy a whole fleet of cloud servers.

EC2 is easy to script. We are able to save our clients a lot of money by scripting their EC2 instance to shutdown/startup at predetermined times so they are only paying for the server when they are using it.

EC2 in my opinion, is lacking the ability to connect to a console from within the AWS console. I sometimes miss how I can connect to the console with VMware and Hyper-V but not with EC2. You have to utilize RDP or SSH to connect to an instance.

Sometimes EC2 instances lockup due to reasons with the underlying hardware and need to be shutdown and the started back up so the instance can spin up on new hardware. This is sometimes a problem because unless you set up proper alerting/scripting, you don't know there is an issue until a user reports it.

EC2 can be a bit daunting for the beginning user. You really do need some kind of training before you dive in.

EC2 is well suited for anyone that is looking to move their servers to the cloud, save money in the process, and future-proof their servers. EC2 even allows for existing VMs from an on-premise or hosted environment to be exported and imported into EC2. Also, AWS makes licensing the operating system super easy.

It is being used by whole organization. We use hundreds of EC2 instances. We are a small company so we do not have resources to maintain physical instances. EC2 solves this issue by omitting the need to maintain our own servers or machines.

Well suited when we do not have space and resources to maintain and have in house servers. Less appropriate when someone needs instances just with high memory or CPU only. In this scenario it is a bit expensive compared to having in-house instance.

Both our customers and we have a wide range of applications uploaded in Amazon EC2. Since we do not have physical servers, we have EC2 instances in our testing, development, production and administrative departments. Also, we support many clients who prefer to manage their own EC2 instances.

EC2 instances allow us to abstract all the management of servers and concentrate on what really generates value in our business: building solutions for our clients.

You can't easily know the end of free trial period, which can generate monthly costs for unused services (even so, the support for these isolated cases is very good!)

The default configuration of resource usage alerts could be better. Even so, there are alternatives to control these cases outside of AWS.

While you're still learning how to handle instances, one can make some serious mistakes, such as leaving open ports or deleting an instance without realizing it. Again, is not a core AWS responsability but a few alerts could be great (or you can leave infraestructure experts handle all the management).

We have utilized EC2 for a wide variety of clients to help deploy a variety of websites & web applications & mobile apps. It is affordable and scalable. Has provide phenomenal uptime, and support has been top notch on the rare occasion I have had to reach out on an issue or question.

When you need total control of your server as if it were a black box in your office, EC2 works great. You can set it up however you need and know it will be reliable as long as your work is reliable. If you are just needing a web host and aren't incredibly server saavy, then you may be better suited looking elsewhere

EC2 is begin used in our organization for a little over 2 years. EC2 has addressed cost and quality, but not customer support, in comparison to GCP and Azure. We are running a few workloads on AWS, including EC2. We moved to AWS after we faced a major performance drop in GoDaddy VPS, and cost was peaking out. Then we evaluated AWS and moved on

It's good to use low end EC2, which cost a few cents an hour for those who are testers (who just need to evaluate it).Blogs and Personal website can be hosted at a very cheap cost (approx. $20) and in a way that's more secure than any other cloud providers. And for high performance EC2, go for Reserved Instances which is more affordable than unreserved instances

We use it for dev instances, staging instances and production instances for the whole organization. We automatically spin up instances as needed, automatically configure the settings and software we need, and it's ready to go in seconds. Prior to this we used managed hosting which caused too many problems with bad customer support and limited access to the servers preventing us from solving our own problems with bugs and scaling.

Huge learning curve. To get a basic instance up with default settings is very easy, but there's hundreds or perhaps thousands of settings without explanations of what they do.

Multiple ways to do the same thing, like the browser console, the command line, and APIs, means finding answers on how to do something may be provided only in one way and not the way you have to do it.

Lack of documentation on best practices in many scenarios. AWS assumes you have devops experience and makes it too easy for you to make mistakes and follow bad practices.

It's great when you need a web site or service up and running immediately with specific settings and software. It's great when you need to scale it within minutes and only pay for the time that the extra power is used. It's not so great when you want to learn how everything works and the documentation is difficult to find or worded differently or out dated because things seem to change every year or two on AWS but the documentation lags a little behind.

We use EC2 instances to deploy development, staging, and test environments. We also use EC2 to manage Magento ecommerce sites for clients. We also deploy our SaaS customer portal solution on AWS EC2 instances. It is mainly used by our development team. It provides us scalable development capabilities and the ability to easily deploy dev copies of any client site.

It is least appropriate where you don't have the technical expertise to manage your own servers. And it's not very well suited for someone who isn't willing to monitor and manage the costs.

It's perfect for development firms and smaller agencies that provide managed hosting because the infrastructure is reliable and safe and it's much easier to manage the costs when you can deploy and scale at will.

Server StorageIO leverages AWS EC2 on different instance types for various Windows as well as Linux images to meet scaling and performance requirements. Workloads vary from I/O workload test, simulation, functionality, performance among others. In addition to EC2 instances, have also used AWS Lightsail VPS instances including for Wordpress as a BC/DR resource.

AWS EC2 is applicable to most any application workload deployment scenario that needs a public cloud, including GovCloud. Even some on-site, on-prem scenarios can leverage AWS Snowball Edge with EC2 on-prem compute to meet some needs. Likewise Lightsail provides options for app specific scenarios, and EKS containers, along with Lambda meet need for serverless/FaaS/PaaS. Key is knowing the various EC2 options from dedicated bare metal to VM to container to even Snowball Edge/SBE. Likewise knowing the various instance options for deployment along with deciding to use on-demand, spot or reserved instances.

All our APIs and microservices in our organization run on EC2. My organization is one of the largest users of AWS cloud. We have our dev, qa, perf, prod environments running on AWS. As part of that, most of our code runs directly on EC2 or on ECS which itself runs on EC2.

EC2 are elastic linux containers to run any application. This is a very good and reliable service. Improvements could be in UI/dashboard and metric presentation. Tools for visualization of cost optimization should be better for users who have lots of applications running on EC2

ECS and EKS are being used in docker and kubernetes environments. So more tech companies are use these services than directly using EC2

EC2 is elastic infrastructure. Your org does not have to invest in in-house data centers and staff to manage the hardware. AWS EC2 provides elastic cloud environment to run lot of this. Price is reasonable and AWS has lot of h/w s/w design pattern to design a reliable software application and run it in a resilient environment.

We are a fast growing financial tech startup based in North Carolina. We sell financial products targeted at banks and credit unions. Built on top of the Salesforce platform we've expanded our offerings with more custom solutions. As a result we've developed several apps that are deployed atop the Amazon EC2 cloud. The cloud deployments are used company wide both for internal testing as well as by the clients in our production instances.

Amazon EC2 offerings are great if you have web applications that have elastic demand, since Amazon handles the scaling of extra resources all on its own. If the goal is to just host a simple static website, then using regular web hosting companies would be much cheaper and simpler.

We are currently using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) across the Engineering team as a way to deploy our applications. It allowed us to scale up from Heroku as we continue to grow. It also helped the ease of have all of our services under the AWS umbrella for accessibility.

If you're a small-to-medium sized company seeking to scale and continuing to grow, EC2 is a good choice for your company. Using EC2 allows for the ease of integration with other AWS products as well. If you're just starting out and looking for less complicated setup and cheaper options, EC2 might not be the best choice for you.

We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in all areas of our organization. A lot of our legacy infrastructure is in EC2 that supports every person in the organization. It's a great way to build a computer resource, on the fly, and in many different instance sizes. The resource selection is amazing.

EC2 is used by us for the majority of our servers. We use it to support cloud-based applications that run on servers. EC2 substitutes having to run servers locally in our datacenters. EC2 is just as basic virtual machine system that allows us to customize them in any way we want and add whatever software we need.

EC2 is an excellent service if you need to replace the power of a data center with many machines all interconnected with networking and a great automation system to set up your environment in a single button press. It is less ideal for smaller scale operations where you only need a server or two or expect to have very light load on your servers and don't need all the extra power provided by EC2.

EC2 is currently being utilized by the IT department to extend our DMZ capabilities. Our corporate location is located deep in the woods, and connection with the outside world can be tenuous. EC2 allows our small company to sit servers on world class hardware in prime locations, granting our customers speed and reliability we wouldn't otherwise be able to offer.

There is a ton of documentation available on their website, however complex concepts like IAM account management don't have enough. While I believe they have done a good job with their documentation, there is just so much in the AWS world that is unique, the job isn't finished yet.

There is no console access for instances, you need to connect via services like ssh or rdp. This makes troubleshooting boot issues needlessly complex.

EC2 Snapshots can't be scheduled from inside the control panel. You need to run EC2 tools on a local computer to manage your snapshots.

Running your whole infrastructure on EC2 instances could be very expensive. For most companies, it would be a great way to host a web server, dabble with offsite high availability for critical servers or EC2 could work as a fantastic extension to a company's DMZ.

Our product was redesigned from the ground up to use EC2. The way that our product has been architected helps up utilize the EC2 infrastructure effectively and has cut our hosting costs by 900%. It has also greatly lowers the difficulty of deploying new releases to all of our customers.

It is a great infrastructure to work with if you are architecting a product. Lots of tools to use and options within AWS that integrate easily with EC2. If you are simply looking to launch virtual machines, make sure you are looking at Reserved Instances and not On Demand instances.

Amazon EC2 helps add flexibility, versatility, security and is easily scalable. We use it for a few web applications internally and have enjoyed using the compute engine offered by Amazon. To add it to its pro's it also supports all the programming languages we utilize and more in case a developer would like to use another language.

If you have data to process then this cost effective solution is the way to go for sure. It's a solid powered work engine and can handle anything you throw at it(depending on the instance.) Plus, its on-demand characteristic saves you a lot of money, in terms of not only on-demand usage, but also avoids hardware costs, or rather, idle hardware costs.

Amazon EC2 is being used by the whole engineering department and also in production to deploy cloud applications. All the REST APIs are being developed and deployed on EC2 instances using the JAVA application. It solves one of the most important problems for our organization, in that it has multiple copies of application servers through EC2 and is highly available.

EC2 is really useful in distributed architectures applications. It solves many business problems and is easy to manage without us having to worry about any physical server. EC2 can be tricky provided the options it gives w/r/t sizing, and sometimes it doesn't work with smaller instances, but bigger instances are costly so organizations can't afford bigger instances

We started using Amazon EC2 as a part of a bigger push by our organization to shift our datacenters to Cloud with Amazon being our choice of providers. It is being used by our entire organization, but our team used EC2 to host Neo4J. The EC2 addresses the problem of managed infrastructure. We added additional scripts to create and maintain the backups of Neo4J database using the EC2 snapshot service.

Snapshot backup service. Since the production database with 50GB of data needs to be backed up with minimal downtime, we relied on the EC2 snapshot service for storing backups and it was a breeze. With about a minute downtime every day, we now have tested, reliable backups that would not have been possible otherwise.

Ability to add different volumes to the EC2 instance. This ties in with the previous point of adding a separate high speed SSD data volume for storing data and backing up that volume on a day to day basis.

Docker style templates for EC2 instances, where the installation, backup and rest of the scripts come out of the box.

Ran into a couple of issues while trying to reboot the EC2 instances, doing reboot on the instance through CLI caused data issues on the system. That needs to be ironed out.

Costs need to be competitive with rest of the market. Found that EC2's are a lot more expensive than its competitors. So if you are tied into the Amazon ecosystem, then EC2 makes sense, but if you are looking for silo EC2 instances, look elsewhere for cost saving.

Our whole organization uses EC2 in a sense that all of our data and all of our clients' backups are stored there. We can address the problem of availability and scalability, putting both us and our customers at ease. They can know their data is safe and always available to them regardless of conditions

EC2 really shines when you have the necessity for quick changes and modifications. The tools available and the different options given to the users make it a snap (as long as you understand Amazon's terminology and topology) to make these needed changes. On that note, Amazon's EC2 platform in my belief shouldn't be used for one-and-done style hosting or computing. If one had many little sites or spaces needed to store data, EC2 would be great. For one website or one app, I don't think EC2 would be worth the knowledge and financial.

I have used AWS to provide web infrastructure including load balancing, databases, web servers, and content distribution. It's great for this because it offers so many tools without having to pay the up-front cost of deploying them. You pay for what you use. That does not mean it's cheap, but at least it's accessible. The speed of deployment is also a benefit.

AWS is well suited for most uses. Even if you have a preference for specific vendor hardware, there are often virtual appliances offered within AWS. BigIP F5 load balancers for example. If you need to be up and running relatively quickly, including the ability to quickly make changes to your environment, AWS is great. It's also great in that you can grow into it and its many many services. However, it is not cheap by any means.

We are hosting a public-facing web application and some internal workers/APIs on a medium-sized pool of EC2 instances. We use Docker with a container orchestration system to manage these services. By running directly on EC2, we are able to utilize spot pricing which saves us 80-90% on our hosting costs.

If you need full configuration control over the servers that your applications run on, then EC2 is well-suited for your use-case. It essentially grants you ownership of your choice of server without the significant overhead that accompanies physical ownership. However, if you're just looking to host a standard application like MySQL or Elasticsearch, I would recommend checking whether or not AWS offers that application as a hosted service. Using hosted services will reduce the amount of time you need to spend configuring and maintaining your servers.

We use EC2 to run all of our .NET and Python application software. It is used by my engineering team as well as various other engineering teams that are running their workloads on AWS. EC2 allows us to have granular control over our hardware as well as gives us the flexibility to change the hardware and scale in/out based on demand. This helps us control our costs and invest when we need to support a spike in usage.

EC2 is suited for cloud native applications where you want to run your workloads. If you have a Linux or Windows application EC2 will likely suffice. You need to design your applications to run in a cloud environment as running a monolithic lift and shift type of application on EC2 will likely cause your application to break or incur unnecessary costs. EC2 is one of the oldest AWS services and is heavily supported and tested. It is up to you how you manage your servers to scale out or in. EC2 is just a box and you need to tell it what to do.

EC2 can get expensive if you don't need to run the system all the time. There are better options like Lambda and serverless technologies that may end up being cheaper and easier to deploy.